Book excerpt: The purpose of the MMM series of conferences is to bring together activities related to all aspects of multimedia modeling, in its broader sense, from multimedia networking to virtual worlds. Its ultimate goal is to provide a better understanding of the basic paradigms and to establish conceptual links between them for better design of future advanced multimedia systems. The proceedings of MMM '96 present the state-of-the-art in the representation, processing, interaction, integration and retrieval of multimedia information.